Page 8 of Faking It

Silence.

“Should I call the police?” Nadia whispers.

“Shh!”

A sudden pounding on the door sends me reeling back. I grip the handle of the bat, parting my legs in a defensive stance.

Chapter 4

Gideon

“Asshole! Don’t tell me you’re still asleep in there! Open the fuck up!”

My shoulders relax, and my hands fall, the bat landing on the carpet with a soft thud. Shaking my head, I throw open the door. “You’re the asshole for showing up to my place unannounced. Don’t make me regret giving you that key. Scratch that. I already do.”

Ryan, my old college mate and manager/agent grins at me, then his eyes shift over my shoulder. “That explains it,” he mutters, backing into the hallway. His smile dwindles. “You and I need to talk.”

A sudden beep on my cell phone lets me know the Uber has arrived. “Give me a minute,” I tell Ryan.

Nadia’s petulant expression is back in place. She shoots me a scornful glare while shimmying past me, as if my touch will burn her somehow. “No need to follow me out,” she snaps. “I can do the walk of shame on my own.”

Ryan stares questioningly as she storms down the hallway, the front door slamming behind her. “Do I even want to know what that was about?” he asks, turning back to me.

I move down the way she’d gone, my mind on the kitchen and Miko’s coffee. “Nope.”

“Oh, just a heads up. I didn’t fly solo,” he announces as we get to the end of the hall.

“The hell does that mean—”

“Good morning, James.”

I pause abruptly at the doorway to the living room, gaping at the dark-haired woman wearing a suit more severe than her expression. “For the last time, Cynthia, it’s Gideon, not James,” I reply firmly. She might be my father’s lapdog, but she doesn’t scare me.

“James is your given name,” she counters. “Your father’s name.”

“Gideon is my middle name. My preferred name,” I shoot back.

Cynthia sighs wearily. “Must we do this every time, James? Your father forbids us from using that name. You know that.”

I glance around the room. “Is he a fly on the wall?”

“Let it go. I’m not calling you Gideon,” she says, crossing her arms above her waist.

“James, good to see you.”

My eyes dart to the gentleman with a bald spot and bad acne. With lots of work to do, I have no more time for a name campaign. I respond to Craig Ellis with a curt nod.

A chestnut-haired, skinny guy rises from the armchair. Carl Parker. “It’s been a minute, James. How are you doing?”

Is it me, or are they deliberately using my first name to piss me off? Did Dad put them up to this? And what are they doing here, anyway?

“What’s going on?” I mutter to Ryan. “Don’t tell me it’s a goddamn intervention.”

I can’t imagine another reason for the management team my dad hired being here. For the last year, they’ve handled everything from a distance, puppets on my father’s strings.

“Not an intervention but close to it,” Ryan mutters back. “Sorry, dude. Duty calls. You weren’t responding to your dad, so he sent us.”

Fucking hell. Trust my dad to pull out the big guns.

---